Metropolis on the Styx: The Underworlds of Modern Urban Culture, 1800–2001 (review)

This is David L. Pike’s third underworldly offering, following on from Passage through Hell: Modernist Descents, Medieval Underworlds (1997) and Subterranean Cities: The World Beneath Paris and London, 1800–1945 (see FS, LXI (2007), 381–82). While moving away from the classical and medieval texts discussed in the first of these, Pike’s familiarity with the earlier pre-texts informs, and is beneficial to, Metropolis on the Styx which is easily as impressive and ambitious as the previous studies. The present work explores the place of the underground—material and metaphorical—in the modern city over the past 200 years, taking Paris and London as its twin focus. Divided into four chapters, the first charts the development of the material underground and conceptions of it, highlighting the key differences between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries such as its ever-increasing prominence in everyone’s everyday life. Pike argues convincingly that the underground of today is shaped by an amalgam of nineteenth- and twentieth-century conceptualizations and experiences including modernist theorizations of space, and the upheaval of two world wars. The second chapter considers the city as hell and more particularly the figure of the devil in a vast range of cultural production, and as such makes a significant contribution to the steadily growing number of works on all things underworldly which, to date, have tended to eschew analysis of specific characters in favour of landscapes. While the second chapter considers surveys of the city from a distanced vantage point above, the third considers the urban mystery genre in books and then films, which is positioned very much in the depths, looking up. Although the connectedness of surface and underground is a concern throughout, it is in the final chapter that this issue receives the greatest attention in an extended analysis of threshold spaces (notably, arcades, arches, tunnels, trenches and cinemas). One of the many strengths of the study is that Pike repeatedly unearths multiplicity where others (including the likes of Benjamin) have seen only singularity. Thus, for example, he presents the devil as ‘an assemblage of contradictory ideas and beliefs, none of which supersedes the others’ (p. 42), and similar observations are also made with reference to the underground as a whole. Likewise, while signalling common trends and exchanges between the two capitals, he constantly underlines their socio-political specificities. In short, this is interdiciplinarity and comparatism at its very best; Metropolis on the Styx encompasses informed analysis of a varied corpus of literary texts, films, paintings, plays, physical structures, works of popular culture and of tourism, and deploys a similarly multidisciplinary methodology. Although the subtitle implies equal coverage of the past two centuries, and although there is discussion of more recent texts and phenomena at the final stages of the four chapters in particular, the principal focus of the study is undoubtedly the 1800–1900 period. But this wide-ranging, richly illustrated and meticulously researched work will be invaluable not only to dix-neuvièmistes but also to anyone interested in the urban environment and its multifarious configurations.